Linux is struggling on the desktop because it only has a small number of "great" apps, according to the Gnome co-creator. Miguel de Icaza, co-creator of the Gnome desktop, told tech journalist Tim Anderson at the recent Windows 8 Build conference "When you count how many great desktop apps there are on Linux, you can probably name 10," de Icaza said, according to a post on Anderson's IT Writing blog. "You work really hard, you can probably name 20. We've managed to p*** off developers every step of the way, breaking APIs all the time."

The title of the article really misses the point of what Miguel said. The actual substance of the story, as far as I can see, comes in two separate points.

First, he's making a point about how Linux's open-source nature has led to fragmentation of APIs on the desktop. This is a perfectly valid complaint. In an ecosystem where there are many competing window managers for Linux, not to mention vastly more competing distributions (all of which are different and none of which are dominant), you're bound to run into obstacles to producing truly great desktop apps.

However, the second point I take from the story is one that Miguel actually seems to miss. For a long time now we've been moving towards a situation where many of the most important desktop applications are actually quite platform agnostic. In part, this has been fuelled by a drive for portability in code that's proved largely successful. Lately we've seen the process accelerated by loads of new platforms being released, each of which competes with traditional desktops, but on which users still want to have available their favourite applications. Platform agnosticism for desktop apps is a really, really good thing.

Personally speaking, of the eight or nine desktop apps I use daily, only one (Visual Studio) doesn't run on Linux. Everything else (Matlab, R, Eclipse, emacs, various compilers for C/C++/Scala/Erlang, etc) works just as happily on Linux as it does on Windows or Mac, so for me the fact that there aren't any truly great Linux-only desktop apps is an irrelevance.